


might this ground be mine

by zuluottawa



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 10:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2305955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuluottawa/pseuds/zuluottawa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She could live in a house she was meant to be saving, that was fading away like sand through an hourglass. She could stand still in its rapid motion and believe in its stead and fight for its history. But she could not be alone. George deserved for her not to be alone." Mary in 1924.</p>
            </blockquote>





	might this ground be mine

**Author's Note:**

> this has been a long, mainly directionless, effort that has hopefully cobbled together into something meaningful. maybe. written for all the lovely people that asked ages ago, namely sam, ash, and rosie. sorry it's so late.

 

 **i.** **_winter_ **

There is something, in a blonde head next to a black-haired one, that is painful.

Rose is markedly shorter than him. The plane of the landscape in line with his shoulders, soil shifting underfoot. Mary churns it with her boots, purposeful in the muck of a rainy January day, and clenches her jaw. Her face feels locked in place by cold. She is careful in how she watches. She tilts away and keeps her periphery clear, leaning back to the sky.

On nostalgic days, Mary is surprised to look down at her skirts, her sleeves, and see they are not black. On those evenings she picks at the beads with her dark gloves and wishes for the gather of grey against her chest. She believes at times George will not recognize her out of monochrome. He likes lilac, likes embroidery. Two years old, he is sharp and mobile, hair a flaxen curl under her palm. Smiling at his world's innocence.

Today, after months of colour, the rich shades of Christmas, old grey tweed envelops her under stark trees and it feels entirely comforting.

The last shot of the drive rings out. Mary follows the bird's plummet to the earth. She has been standing still too long. Tom, who is awkward with a shotgun broken over his arm, walks up beside her. His long breath streams white into the air. “I still don't understand the fuss,” he says.

“I don't believe you killed a thing,” she drawls.

The pheasants are iridescent, plucked up from the grass. Their jewel necks slashed white, bodies gilt with gold.

“I'm a pacifist, really,” Tom laughs.

“Hm.” Beneath the reed of her voice she can feel a wavering, a stone in the ground, her heel caught and twisted. Tom sways nearer. Looks at her from under the shadow of his cap. He has large eyes. Large and grey and somewhat wise. Maybe Sybbie does too, though Mary can only see her sister in her niece. Matthew's eyes have of course become George's. That possession is some cruel genetic trick. (Or they were her mother's, from eastern seaboard skies.)

Black is all Mary's own.

 

Mary walks under blue-bowed trees. She makes her way to the walled garden, finds the sharp shadows of the gate and the frost within. There’s always a stick to the latch. Ice that would freeze her fingers without gloves. She clasps her hands and stands on the path. Waiting. She is half-turned back towards the house, spires above trees below sky, all bleak shades of January, her hands twisted together. The leather creaks. She watches the silhouettes of the hunting party. Rose by Tom now. Mama and Papa. The taller-shorter staggering of Tony and Charles. They are vague friends, by happenstance. Through war and tradition and old acquaintance. It is all old, fractious. It is remote, standing still, imagining pasts. She starts as the sound of laughter tumbles down the verge towards her. She leaves the gate. Mirrors their trajectory back to the house.

Charles moves up ahead with confidence in his stride. Tony sees her and pauses. They meet on the convergence of the path as the crowd runs round them, pebble to river stream. Her mother's head flicks sideways. The trees snap in wind above them, where Mary and Tony trail behind.

“Charles is going to Ulster, you know,” Tony says.

“Oh?”

“Reluctantly. His uncle died in November.”

Light slants its way through the spires. She weaves slightly on the gravel underfoot. “I can't imagine calling him a 'sir'.”

Tony is looking at her, shotgun crooked over his arm like a lazily slung coat. She picks at the sleeve of her tweed. His voice is low, edged with implication. “He never did seem to want to tell you any of it.”

( _There will be a life for me someday. Isn't that something for us to celebrate?_ )

“No. Well,” Mary nods. “We all have futures to plan,” she says cautiously.

( _Of course_.)

 

Rose may be spring, but Mary is winter. She wears the colours of the pheasant's neck, dark red. Feels a thrum of living in the veins of the house, contained by her hands before her. Rose, in her pink embroidered gown, is a child through her first season. In her silk gloves and too-heavy diamonds. Mary has been told she can carry diamonds, but the tiara snags her hair. She watches Tony's head incline politely, hands clench then smooth behind his back. She watches the slight discomfort in his shoulders. He turns in profile, eyes downcast towards her. It is a subtle gesture, an invitation. Perhaps Mama notices too, because Rose leaves under Cora's pointed stare, and as Mary takes to his side Tony's smile breaks. “She's harmless,” he says.

“Young. Not harmless.” Mary sways. “I don't know what that makes me.”

He only raises an eyebrow, and offers his hand. She is thawing, the lines of his palm running warm beneath hers. Thawing on the slatted floor, in the cornices of pointed arches, in the ease of stringed instruments counting out her footsteps.

As the needle skips she thinks her decision could be made, in that pause.

(No, it was made months ago.)

“What are we doing, Mary?” he asks, head bent down to her, mouth barely moving.

She reels herself out of the dance hold. “Hiding,” she says, turning for the edge of the crowd.

 

It is the library, of course that place where all her trials seem to begin, form, end. She stares at him from the centre of the room. His black-and-white shadow, the shape his face turns to in the little light of evening. She realizes that dancing she rests her arm flat against his. She realizes the unconscious action, the comfort in it, the pressing back of her body to his palm. She realizes their heads will bend the same way, each to their left, and her gaze has found his mouth far too many times. She realizes all these things at once, before his voice cuts across her.

“It makes you stoic,” he says.

She draws her eyes up from her twisting hands. “What?”

“You said you didn't know, but you are – I admire your stoicism and am frightened by it.”

His voice whispers and catches. He is ink against the gilded door. In a moment of judgement, it is like her heart stops. Breath goes in, balloons out, her veins track blood and her heart-muscle contracts faster than before. She is shaking, in the way of overactive nerves, conviction, wishing she could measure her certainty. “Come here,” Mary says, while she is shaking. Her voice stays still. He stays still. Her hand stretches in the air between them. “ _Come here._ ”

Tony takes a step, three strides, places his hand in hers.

“And you're more pragmatic than you let on,” she says.

His eyes glitter at her. “Am I?”

“'He's dead and I'm alive,'” she quips. “I haven't forgotten, you know.”

He gives that shy pull of the mouth, looking down. She reaches without thinking. Holds her fingers beneath the edge of his jaw. He laughs, one single unconstrained breath.

“I needed to hear it, Tony. Don't worry.”

(She could live in a house she was meant to be saving, that was fading away like sand through an hourglass. She could stand still in its rapid motion and believe in its stead and fight for its history. But she could not be alone. George deserved for her not to be alone.)

Tony draws away. He always stands with hands behind his back. An elegant way to face the world: the aristocratic blood locking him in place, the parade stance of a sailor leaving port. “Can I be honest, Mary?”

“I thought we were rather good at that,” she returns.

“Do you want me to wait.”

(Mama once said that the world wasn't changing fast enough for Mary, but that was before the Black Hand smacked the globe and knocked down millions. And automobiles killed people nowadays, the living left to reconcile that these things were the dark, viscous oil in the cogs of _progress._ )

(Still, they retained some aspects of themselves. They were wreathed in weary titles. Mary's wish for its validation had withered with sensibility, action, heavy items she must hold in her hands simply to know their worth. She had learned she would rather have ledgers and maps than the jewels she was trained to wear.)

“You know – ” Her hands slipping to his starched shirtfront warrant a rapid heart. His fingers unfold on the catch of her earring. She leans so her cheek is at line with his. Her fingers so cold next to his. He waits for her instigation. She bows against him, beaded fabric laddering silk lapels. He is taller, finer, darker than Matthew. Broader in muscle, thinner in bone. Present. His palms slide forward. She kisses him one way, right, the other, left.

“It's always a comfort to have another ally in this world,” she finally says, opening her eyes.

 

The party leaves in a cool morning fog, in vehicle lights that siphon through it. Mechanical sound seems to snag on the clouded grounds. The air smells clean. The house looks grey. Mary's rings feel loose. Charles tips his hat, shakes her hand, says something inane and smiles, yet it is like she is in a pocket of the cold morning and cannot be reached. And she is tired. ( _I did not sleep for worrying_ .) Unfocussed. Tony's hand is a warm shock in hers (thawing), a goodbye on his lips before he turns away. She wants to pull him back. Say, _the library, no mistakes, I meant it_ , but thinks, in his settled posture, that he knows.

The cars depart. Etched out in white.

 

 

 **ii.** _**spring** _

They run circles round one another in interluding weeks, the city-country divide. Until the fox hunt, until Tony is there, in brown tweed in the doorway, and they meet with an odd, surprised pause. Mary says they should walk. She bites back a smile. She is glad to see him, glad to be reminded of him. They draw level, the back of his hand grazing her wrist.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Glad to be away from London,” he sighs. “And you?”

“Busy.” They reach the grass, and nerves catch up in her. The fading afternoon sun burns against her hair. She fiddles, holding her breath, looks at the sway of trees in burnished light. His presence is too shadowing beside her, too whole and close and unassuming, while her heart picks up pace. “Tony,” she begins. Their feet slip on silver-lain grass, the dewed stalks. The cool stone folly beyond them. She takes a breath of damper air. “Don't you feel... We're at something of an impasse, aren't we?”

After a moment he touches her elbow to stop her. He looks to the field, turns back slowly, eyes narrowed to full sunlight. He stoops forward in his concern. “Why are you so worried, Mary?”

“I've become impatient, I suppose.” She holds her arms out at her sides. A breeze ripples and hisses in the grass. “I feel I know you, yet I don't have any space or time to do so.”

He is nodding. ( _The system we're trapped in_. He was disillusioned with it, she had seen that before, in his hesitance and advice. A bitter streak ran through them both, a claim of something unfair and begrudged, fought for, yet taken on with a sigh. The responsibility was, in all practicality, gone, for him. Burnt out by war and death and cast aside as obsolete, like over-read papers. Yet the title remained, ink on fingertips. She wanted her own shifted. Reordered. Stacked anew.)

The day is bringing in cloud. She glances across his face. “I must be sure, Tony, in every way, of whom I'm to marry.”

His squint turns to amusement. “So you want to break old rules.”

She shrugs. “Everything else is changing.”

They walk again. They reach the folly steps, weave against the pillars. He shakes his head, gentle, feet light, back propped on stone. “I do admire you.” But his voice is low, betraying their earlier tension, and it spears her breath from her, and she _wants._ It would be easy to step forth and kiss him again, hold the movement of his jaw in her palms. She shifts halfway from his dark, even gaze. She is full of starts and stops, impulses and trepidations.

She feels warm. “We should go in. We have to wake early tomorrow,” she says, like she is cautioning herself.

His head dips. He takes a step, to pivot, but she thinks _damn it all_ and catches him before he turns, holds her hand on his jacket edge. The slim taper of his torso beneath. She clenches her fist from moving. Feels a charge in his eyes. A black spear of eyelashes. It has been so long since she has felt anything close to lust. Long enough for her to become unacquainted with the lines and angles of men. Their fingers play against each other. She is tightly wound, tingling, looking to his lips closed. Thinks he has a lovely mouth, before she kisses the pout of it open, all her energy, palm on his jacket pressing in to his waist. He leans. His hands splay on the round of her shoulders.

And she realizes it is not an impasse at all. “I'm no good at beginnings,” she says.

“Yes you are.” The wide brown of his eyes somehow prove the point. “You know your mind.”

Rain starts soft, as a sigh in the poplar behind them, is absorbed into stone and grass and opens its scent in the air. She says lightly, eyebrows raised, “Well then, I'm glad I still have some allure.” It isn't about sex, she thinks. Attraction, yes, but there is a deeper vein, a colder river running through her that is sensible, and quickly becoming sure. She leans up and presses a kiss to his travel-rough cheek. “We really should go inside before we're soaked to the bone.” Stepping away from his body heat, she holds her jacket closer around herself as she navigates the steps.

“I don't particularly mind,” Tony says, holding his hands palm up to the drops, beside her in earth that is bleaching of colour, water that is coming fast. He looks at the mottled sky. He grins. Mary laughs.

 

The next morning is cold and clear. Papa says there is ice on the roads from the night before.

Mary imagines the slip of it in London's streets, the clog of exhaust. Her reality never used to be so full of fumes, so darkened by a machine's turnover. Four years of war's smoke. Horses were creatures of her childhood. Diamond gone. This horse is white, speckled, breathing steadily in the frost.

Tony stands next to her. He is relaxed, amongst a crowd of red and navy jackets, and she likes him here, it is old and new. Level. His hand passes across the horses flank as she adjusts in to sidesaddle. Straight spine. _I am allowed this,_ she thinks _._

She cranes her neck back to the house. George is at the door. He sees her looking and flies out on the gravel – _Mama! –_ weaves dangerously close to the horse's back. In a flash of motion he is swung into Tony's arms. She presses on the reigns as the dogs mill about their feet, her glove sticking as her knuckles knot. She stares George in the eyes. “Don't ever do that,” she snaps. “It was very foolish of you.”

George blinks and looks away. His cheeks highlight with shame. “It's alright,” Tony says gently. “You frightened your Mama, that's all.”

Her eyes flick to him. “It's not _alright_ ,” she says.

It comes to her, slowly, after her heart has slowed, the image of Tony holding her son. George will never be mistaken, in his heart-shaped face, for the son of the man holding him now. The man whose lapel he rests his cheek upon, the cuffs his fingers twist as Tony moves to hold him secure. They recover. Tony smiles reassuringly at her. George wriggles, a hound jumps up, Tony gathers the boy and nudges away the dog's paws with a bent knee. The bugle sounds, and George is set down to walk back into the shadow of the house. Mary tries to speak, but Tony steps over to his own horse without a word and mounts in one fluid movement. He frowns, shifts his brown-top boots against the stirrups. They wait.

 

“Thank you,” Mary says finally, when the hunt has begun to trot forward. “With George.” 

Tony tilts his head towards her. “I'm sure I did something like that when I was small.”

“You know, I'm not certain it wasn't me,” she says.

(Diamond had glided. Her mother had taught her to float, in her steps, walk weightless. The horse was much the same. Elegant and prize, at first. She had picked up a canter too quickly, in mud and slicked grass, had been warned that the wall looked high. She thought he might spook. They sailed clear. Her neat landing pushed confidence through her heart as it jarred. She loved the recklessness. The realignment of control.)

“It likely was,” Tony says.

She gives him a reproachful look, playful as he smiles. “Our first hunt at Downton was in such a downpour, do you remember?”

His voice lifts up happily. “I was shivering so much I could hardly control the reigns,” he laughs.

“We were very young.”

(Tony was never an option, not even in that first season, a near decade into the new century when she was sharp and expected for Patrick. Tony was the childhood companion, in her tomboyish moments, when their fathers were still in Africa and their mothers fretted in large shadow-bearing hats. They were the eldest children slotted into expectations now gone stale, and Mary wondered when it happened, when the imperious child became sad at all that was slipping away, and stared wearily at what was to come. She knew when. He was never an option, pre-war, _before._ ) 

The light dapples, warm on her shoulders. “Charles has invited us to Ireland in the summer,” Tony says easily.

Mary's posture sharpens. “ _Us_? What impression have you given him, Tony?” She grins at him. “Besides,” she says, less teasing. “It will be the middle of the season, and I have business in London.”

“You think it would be awkward.”

“I don't know what it would be.”

She dislikes March, but the corridor of trees is calming. Silence and birdsong. The hounds, the horns, braying far off.

“Mary, what did you mean, an ally?”

( _We are better on paper. I am happy around you_.)

“At the shoot,” Tony clarifies.

Mary keeps her gaze forward as a vague embarrassment floods her. “I meant – I meant it's nice not to argue.” She shuts her eyes and lets the horse sway carry her, sun paint white beneath her eyelids. “It's nice to have someone's loyalty, is all.” She breathes deeply. “I think Charles is preoccupied, and always will be.”

“So where's the end point?”

She looks at Tony now, a pace or two off her. Expecting frustration to be set in his features, instead finding a loose smile. “You know the ultimate outcome,” she says, “But I don't need an end point.” The bugle pitch siphons through the air. They are forced into speed as the trees clear, the valley opens up, and Mary feels the danger of it coil in her stomach. Hunting stance returns to her muscles easy as anything.

 

Evening lines itself in gilding over the treetops. There is a silence, a tiredness to the day. Mary holds George in her arms. “Shall we go look for a bedtime book?” she murmurs. He nods against her shoulder. It is more rare, that he lets her hold him now. He is growing into longer limbs and proper haircuts, suits. He is a child, but she can see the person in him. The rules that will come to bind him in. She thinks of the morning, his veer from the horse's back, and makes her way downstairs.

The great hall is empty, chatter in snippets from the open drawing room door. She is surprised, in the library, to find Tom beside Tony. Tom isn't one for these functions. She hesitates, watches them speak closely, leaned together over the table by the french windows. George kicks his leg against her side. It prompts her to step forward, and the image unfolds in fading light, two men discussing the estate. It wrinkles in her, for a moment. They lean over a map. Rounding the sofa she sees the paper between them, an outline of Downton's property, the inlay of its wider location. They track straight, deliberate lines against the page.

“Don't mind us,” Mary says, padding across to the ledger.

They look up and turn in unison. “We were discussing the new tenancy agreements,” Tony says.

“Politics at so late an hour,” she quips. “And with such a hothead.” She smiles at Tom.

“And why is George up?” Tom returns.

Mary shifts his weight on her hip. “He wants a pirate story. I'm afraid I don't know the first thing about them, so I've come to look for resources.”

The spines are bright-bound metallic thread in last sunlight. Tom's voice floats to her. “Well I'm sure the man who's been in the Navy knows a few,” he says. She turns from the shelves, lifts her fingers from the book casings, to see Tom looking pointedly between her and Tony. There is a brief flare of annoyance at him, before Tony smiles at her, almost apologetic.

“I suppose I do,” he says.

Mary pauses. George perks up and lifts his head. “Alright,” she sighs, as George goes willingly into his arms, as he had this morning. She feels an odd disconnect, watching them. They return to the map. Light in George's hair. Straight lines. Ease. She jumps when Tom's hand rests on her shoulder.

“You're doing fine,” he whispers, letting go. Shutting the door silently behind him.

She sits down on the sofa and listens. The fire shifts on itself, glows off and on like breathing. The room fades down. Tony quietly tells seafaring stories. George laughs at the pirate voices. “You see this map, this tail of land? That's where all the smugglers' caves are.”

“Treasure?”

“Of course.”

Gold hair next to black. Mary often wonders what George looks like to other people, people who didn't know Matthew. She can never see herself in him, not even in what is learned and not inherited. She moves from her seat over to them. Tony looks up. A pause in his gaze. Permission. George smiles. “Mama! Listen to the pirates!”

“I heard, darling.” Her eyes dance over Tony's. “Very good.”

Yet for all her amusement, she feels conflict strangle in her chest. Tony puts George down. Straightens, his hand flat on the paper's unfurled edge. George traces the black-ink lines of the south coast, pauses and nudges Tony's hand back. He glances down. Steps entirely away. George takes up the space, leans with his elbows on the table, small and wondrous, head propped in his palms. Mouthing the place names as he scans across them.

Mary nods towards the small library, and Tony follows.

“I was mistaken to...” he starts, when they are past the pillars, orange flaring through the windows.

“No.” She reaches out to hold his wrist.

“I overstepped, Mary.”

“I'm telling you, you didn't.” There is a streak of light to his eyes, russet. She says, “I'm glad George likes you. Truly.” Glances to his mouth. “You're helping me.”

He tilts his head. The creasing of his gaze relaxes as he speaks. “Good.” 

“I – ”

( _– Do you know I am quite afraid of feeling? That pine is such an eloquent word, that George is all his father cannot be and perhaps I fear that his hair has a glance of blond; or that even Sybbie's curls are painful. Do you know that Tom and I share a line of grief, that I am sometimes lonely descending the staircase for the evening as a half-whole, and think I should recess to darker colours. Do you know that what expectation wants and what it gets never match (yes I think you know that). Do you know how to be a creature of duty (yes). You know, I want and want and nowadays dislike my selfishness. I should give everything I can to my son but I have always had a streak of vanity and do you notice people look at us when we dance, like perhaps we are an elegant thing, and do you see me clutching my hands this way so I won't touch you. I was once told I was a storm braver, but in truth I am terribly blind at navigation and you are acquainted with the sea in its rages aren't you? Would you?_ )

She twists her necklace in her fingers. Not speaking at all.

( _Know this: I am practical in love. Or I wish to be. I wish to balance the scales in the weight my bones must carry. You are sacrificial, you have broad straight shoulders. We could prop up brick and stone between us._ )

Anthony, patron saint of lost things. She has _lost,_ he knows. He is always somewhat lost himself.

So she dares to ask, because she wants to find the nameless rag that's been snagged in her chest. She wants it pulled free. She wants away from aimlessness. She realizes she does not need time, not anymore. She needs to step off the edge.

“Will we meet before you leave?” she asks.

Her stomach swoops. (Hope.)

 

 **iii.** _ **summer**_  

Anna doesn't speak of finding her wedding rings in a coat pocket. Says nothing to Mary's bare hands rubbing in cream at night. The rings sit on smooth polished wood for a week, as though Anna is testing whether she is certain, and then they are put away, in a velvet box, in a drawer with lock and key.

( _I must live sometime._

 _Yes, milady._ )

 

Liverpool is oppressive under June fog, the two of them stood in the grey, rain-sheeted shadow of Cunard white marble. It has always been a grubby city of transit to Mary: pier head and its flood of ferries, sailors, saline smell. She supposes Tony associates such things with Navy ships and the docks familiar to him farther northeast. But for her, here, right next to the Liver, is where Sybil had left her life behind, returned to it, and never left again.

(She was tired of remembering, or being reminded to remember, to push forward what had been pushed back. To tug war with life and death. She was choosing, right now, she was choosing. Next to her. Flanking her with hands clasped, hair curling, face set. He could be intense when he wanted, worried lines to his face when unaware, a dichotomy of gentle actions and restless presence. He carried sadness in a way she understood. A way that could not easily be cast off, but was folded back from view, masked, worn away by certain people's words.)

The city gleams with rain and she huddles in the lining of her coat, asks what now with her eyes to his profile. The click of their shoes yields glimpses of thick boulevards and ambling cars. For the first time in months, Mary feels like she is settling into a new age, breathing urban air. “I wouldn't mind it, you know,” she says.

She feels his body turn in as they walk. “What?”

“Being mistaken for a viscountess.”

“Oh? I thought title didn't matter much to you now.”

“I don't think it does. But a person matters.” There is wind off the water, a brine to it, blowing through marble arcades and pushing them east into the city centre. She speeds up. “Far more than I gave them credit, really.”

He smiles. It isn't for knowing who she is talking about, it isn't at all for himself. She thinks of the months between quiet conversations in hidden corners and walks in the grounds, like time is looped through all the words she has given him. She thinks she is unable to wait on chances now. Or has lingered too long. Her glove runs his shoulder and he rocks forward. The promenade is empty and rain-slick and the wind buffets against them.

“And what of Charles?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Money doesn't make a marriage,” she says. (Ironic, for her own parents' union began with a transaction of rings and only cautious thought of what would grow over a lifetime. But she had learned marriage from love. She still had a lifetime. Different as it may be, would be, to how she imagined.) “Neither does argument.”

“You're ruthless.”

“Practical,” she corrects. “A balance must be struck. Things have worked for the best.”

She presses her hand across his arm, a wrap that turns half to an embrace. They freeze there, Liver blurring in her sight line over his shoulder. He murmurs, cheek cool, breath warm, “I believe you.”

 

 _I'm no good at beginnings. I hate to be predictable. I'm glad that I still have some allure._ She is not quite certain, like any heady thing, how this moment came to be. It's muddy, months ago, what the conversation was to bring it about. When the glances were, within the time frame. But here it was.

“Yes,” she said, hands behind her back. (What was the question?)

 _Yes,_ she says, gathering herself close, levering up against his shoulder.

Here, smiling against his lips. Here, near a white-washed window in a grey-blue-foam room. Here with her body hovering, his on tiptoe a second in surprise. They always seem together under low settled skies. And then they both sink and curve, spines finding a matched line to pivot on. His lips press in as he responds. (I am talking to you silently.) Mary holds his shoulder as an axis. His touch lands light on her hips, draws away, shadows her face, and he pulls back to take the pin from her hat. An awkward beat as he sets it aside. Then her hands higher, at his neck. He sighs, is shy, is black-lined and cautious. He tries to look at her or affirm her certainty, but she holds her palm softly in his hair and he sinks against her again.

One step to the next seems blurred, in its slowness. He is already in shirtsleeves, and she is sure she is the one to undo his tie, shirtfront after waistcoat. Is sure that his fingers are unzipping her dress. It all lands in nervous waves across her body. A sideways coolness, made shocking by his warm hand down her back, over the sheen of her slip. She likes their silence, that they do not have to bid direction to instinct. She drags his trousers off. He pulls the slip over her shoulders. Lets it fall in a single gather down her body. Slow. Easy, for her to place her mouth against his collarbone briefly, and for his in turn to find the skin behind her ear. Easy, for it to all start up again with the bare notch of her hips below his own.

A turn, backwards, fall.

Her spine finds its mould in the mattress. He skims his palm down the concave of her ribs, fingers light, thumb edging circles. Warm, tan, long hands. She breathes in with the touch, makes the hollow sharper. Then his arms are behind her shoulders, slipping under her. Her knees go up. Back, back, her limbs hem him in. She cannot box any of it. It is his turn to push and she cannot stop her arch, cannot silence the contract of her throat, her fickle lungs. His weight hovers. This pause is all eyes, all study, all low feeling and bated breath. She pulls his weight down to her, so they are flat against one another, his body leaning lithe, so they are in and around one another. _(Move,_ she implores.)Their mouths meet sweetly, and it is an all-new hello.

 

After he has crossed the grey Irish Sea, after she has caught a train home and walked into the village, Mary calls at Grantham House.

The garden is in bloom of foxglove and roses. Isobel's happy wave from the picture window as she walks up the path is enough to make Mary crumble. She straightens her hands, irons out her breathing, before the door opens.

“I just arrived from London,” she lies.

“Of course, dear. Come in.” The entranceway is cool. Its shadows green-tint from the sun outdoors. Isobel's bright, loud voice. “I'd hoped to come up to the house to see George. Are he and Sybbie flying their kite?”

(Tom spooled the string through the children's hands. Mama held her hat in the wind and smiled. A dizzy triangle of white and red dipped in the sky.)

Life continues oblivious.

 

By August, summer is fading. Mary veers from the path, into the dampening grass, down the verge towards the treeline. Dusk streaks a cool purple over the clouds. Rain tomorrow. There is an electric jaundice to the air, the buzz of impending thunder. Mary loosens her hands at her sides. She cannot shake it, the feeling still lodged beneath her sternum, where his fingers swept it through. 

There is a tree, a large broad poplar, that fell in a thunderstorm. As the grounds sink into themselves, fuse dry-cracked edges and roots and rot, Mary walks to that tree. _I don't need an end point._ (I don't want one.)

But there must be. There must be a _point_ , resolved somewhere at the back of her mind. It became linear, after that conversation. She as director. She becomes a succession of appointments and farm-visits, Tom always at her side, never asking questions. She has opinions, and between them is quiet for herself. George grows, grows more, and this is the only way in which she marks the passing of time. She walks in the grounds' fraying leaves and watches sundown.

She thinks of dancing. Twirls her foot in the grass. The air is chilled, easing itself low down around her ankles. She sits on the bark and beneath it imagines skin. Lines. Fingers to the lines of her palm, eyes above, shut, then open and happy.

They will drag this tree away and burn it. It will indent the ground, scarify in mud. The leaves are going. A large sighing skeleton, settling its way into the earth. Black mulch beneath the branches' curve flat down, where its own shadow is rotting. Mary thinks to tell the gardeners tomorrow, for them to take the beached thing elsewhere. _Use it in your fires, is it a good burning wood?_ She stands at the mangle of upturned root and brushes away clods of dirt. It sticks, wet, to her gloves. Translucent, the mat tangled underneath. White-bone.

The dirt makes her remember the muck that gathered in Diamond's hooves. Things buried and unearthed, kept in the soil. It isn't guilt she feels, or sorrow, but relief, that she can take this step without being dragged back fully.

There are many befores, and afters.

 

 

 **iv.** _ **autumn**_  

Tony returns. Speaks of verdant, uneasy land. “It rained most of the time,” he laughs. He seems to be making light of something hollow, as she looks at him too long. They pivot on the drive, in long coats, in manners, in drizzle. “I've been in London since. I wasn't sure if...” He glances at her, then away, shoulders lifting with a sigh.

(Tom had told her of Ulster. Politics tangled in religion. A thing that would always rear its head. He went quiet on the subject quickly, when he heard the word _baronet_ , eyes dark. _There's a socialist in you yet_ , Mary said. She heard the mutter of 'home rule' and 'apron strings' before Tom dismissed himself. She wondered if it was a place that felt stretched tense, like Dublin did, all those years ago. So close to a turnaround. A sorrow, on the ground, too. A long memory. Everyone had a list of names, these days.)

“I missed you,” Tony says in a cloud of his own breath. _Missed_ , because for all his trepidation, he is always certain of his affections. Is this some standard, she wonders. Stood outdoors smiling at one another, being civil through the tension of having touched, knowing _slept_ and sleeping, acting careful with it now. His eyes are warm and wide. He laces his hands. Looks so lovely and loving. (Isn't that what Tony is, simple and easy adjectives.) Mary leans towards him, then thinks better of it. Jimmy is impassive, nods, and they enter the great hall together. Tony's hands go behind his back, head up. “I missed this place, too.”

They go in to dinner. Stand apart. Amiable. Mary feels she is simply waiting to be alone. On retiring, with no-one to look, she holds his hand from last landing to the gallery.

“You go this way, I go that?" 

“No.”

(Love could be built. Love could be made from flammable things or stones, and it was in choosing the details – _your eyes are a brown turned silt at times_ – that it could be stoked and shifted. So.)

The heat of his fingers linked in hers is her focus as they whisper up the dark staircase, the nursery stairs at the base of the central spire, and wind through a wing of the house Mary has not been in since she was a child. “Do you remember it here?” she asks the dark smudge of his shadow behind her. “We frightened Sybil with ghost stories.” Their voices hiss, his catching up as she stops at a corner of where the gallery is a floor below them. His hand moves to fully grasp hers. It reminds her of years ago, snooping in servant’s quarters. It reminds her of years before that too, crouched at the edge of doorways. Sardines; forts from dust sheets; Sybil’s scream at slammed doors and their covered laughter in the closeted mustiness of her grandpapa’s old coats. Carson’s stern words. Mama’s frown at the dust on their clothes.

“I remember all of it,” Tony whispers. He squeezes her palm. “I wish I could have met Sybil.” When Mary turns, his eyes glint kindly. “Now, I mean. Judging by Tom’s accounts she turned out to be quite the firebrand.” He watches her face, as she does his, careful over the bones peaked by shadow, and Mary lets out a slow breath.

“She’d have liked you,” she says, fiddling with his lapel, levelling her voice as she thinks of the sweet-rough tone of Sybil’s. The solace of her sister's often gentle, observant nature. “Somewhat kindred spirits.”

The room has a sweet, unopened smell of dust, disturbed by their footsteps. Mary's fingers slide away from his to drag the curtains open. The windows hold a film of grime, and in the quiet there is the soft thunk of shutters being pulled back, the rustle of fabric as Tony maneuvers around furniture. A louder snap surprises her and she turns from looking outside to see a dustsheet bunched up in his grip.

“This reminds me of the war,” she says suddenly. “Airing the house out.”

“Mm,” he says. “I don’t like to think of that time.”

Mary turns from the narrow windows overlooking the park. “We had people then we don’t now.”

They stare at one another, for a long thin moment, until Mary breaks it. The world settles just as she feels she is about to fall from it. The sky is yellow-lined, darkest blue. There is the clang of servants through the warrens of the house. _Early days_ , Mary thinks. She is bone tired. She is tired of carrying weight alone. And she doesn't think Tony expects it, the stoop of her shadow across the room. Her arms around his waist and face to his lapel. He closes a circle around her shoulders. His cheek a point to her hair. The metre of breathing. An odd comfort, wherein she is asking nothing more, and yes, trust is what she wants a lifetime of. This is what she has fallen for, the simplicity of another heart beating close by.

(She had missed... not _him_ , exactly, but yes, his presence. She had missed what was tactile.)

(Love can be built.) 

“I've regretted it for a long while, you know,” she says to his silence. “Saying no.”

The plane of his jaw tilts along her hair, hits her temple. “You're proposing to me now,” he murmurs in her ear.

She smiles against black fabric. “Perhaps it's time I did,” she says.

(Years ago, in carefree hours, they were five years old, grass-stained and laughing.)

“Would you be happy, Mary?”

(Ten. Smart with a governess, posed in a public school uniform. Systems and rules. _Polish up_.)

“I am happy just now.”

“Truly?”

(She was eighteen in London, ostrich feather, red gold white, confined to her role. Gloves slipping on flower stems. Gloves slipping in men's palms.)

“I would have days when I wasn't my best.”

“I know." 

(They were in different uniforms, different weaponry. Wool and oil skins. Flint features and glass jars. Waiting. Wringing hands, wringing sea brine, ringing guns across the Channel that might scatter the Orkney gulls. At twenty-five.)

She says into the curve of his shoulder, “I'll try.” (They were in the morning grounds. Mourning.)

His voice wavers. The tick of his blink on her skin. “And _I'll_ try.” (They are thirty-three.)

End points only begin something else.

She leans up to kiss him, revisit that old feeling, curls her fingers over his collar. Right. Right, in the disused shadows of the house. Right, that her heart jumps as his hands unwind down her spine. Twine and dance on tiptoe. She breathes in sharply. She bites his lip. She can imagine it, a life of this, and of walks and estate talk and other children. Tall, dark-haired and pale, strong in their bones until they smile. Tony is _there_ , she has become used to it. He puts his forehead to hers and says he loves her. She has come to expect that openness, too.

(He was never an option. Yet the world changes, and she cannot be alone, and the estate is heavy. His is an estate gone, hers waning at the edges. Fought for through a haze. Nothing is clear, and she has realized that perhaps it shouldn't be. Perhaps only some things should be in focus, as the rest fades, and comes up when needed, and is dealt with. Life not as a challenge, but a long thread, knotted, never cut. Some lengths longer than others.)

 

Rarely, Isis follows Mary outdoors. The dog scampers to her side that morning, follows her into the mist. She wakes these days without a grip in her chest. She is not easily pulled back into dreaming. It is how she knows it has been long enough. She wears old houndstooth and walks alone, Isis nudging at her skirt. Mary puts her palm to the top of the dog's head. Lets her bound, and whistles her back. _I own this_ , she thinks, as the trees lift off mist. _I own my decisions, too._

When she enters the library still in the grips of cold September air, Cora looks up with surprise.

“I only took the dog,” Mary smiles, removing her gloves.

This is how she tells her mother that her life is moving forward, as all had suspected. It is methodical, precise ritual. The clink of china. The round sympathetic vowels of her mother's voice. Stilling bone between her fingers. Innocent questions through her teeth. Nonchalance, needling. (Thread it all together, Mary.)

“George is quite fond, by now, I expect.” Rings and a fire roaring, a silver needle. Her mother weaves embroidery thread and thick cloth with firm precision. Red over blue over brown over black – (Oh.) Eyes down, lips pursed.

“Children that age...” Cora sighs. “Don't let him become too attached if you don't mean to make something of it.”

“Really, Mama,” Mary says, like she has always done, droll, exhaustive. “You must know.”

 

 _Engaged_. Tom is first to speak in the stupor. “Well done, to the pair of you.” His grey eyes shine.

  

“We're going to take these flowers somewhere very special,” Mary says.

George stops running his fingers through the patterns of light the vase makes, and looks up at her. “Is it a birthday present?”

She pushes her palm against the fine strand of his hair. “No, darling. Run downstairs and ask Carson for your coat.”

 

Peonies for Sybil, Lilies for Matthew. Both white, with the tiny blue of forget-me-not in their creases. Mary has forgotten the language of flowers. They are spring blooms on autumn graves. George cradles the stems carefully against his chest as Mary opens the gate to the churchyard.

“We must always come here, George,” she tells him, walking up the path. “We must always say hello.”

He slips under her arm, falls against the fabric of her coat. He crouches in front of Sybil's grave first. The peonies clasp the grass in their cupped petals. Then Matthew's, where George's eyes question her and the lilies nestle in the earth. She thinks he knows, in his way. Eyes unfocussed on the words of his father's name.

(You'd want my happiness, Matthew.)

(Sometimes, from then on, in driving through the village, in passing by, George will wave to the stones.)

 

Mary doesn't tell them that the shadow of Sybil follows behind her. Sybil who holds her veil, who re-arranges it around her shoulders with no touch at all. On the curve of the vestibule doors maybe Matthew is unfocussed behind Sybil's kind and dancing eyes. The man in a uniform, walking through a train platform; man in white under cypress, turned away. Mary is not in white. She is in the gossamer of moth's wings, dust falling at the barest brush. The cloth is a silver-blue that only looks so in yellowed light.

_I do._

They dance in the great hall to a gramophone that cracks, missteps. It is old reminders and new songs, and Mary settles in it, the circles they pattern through on the flooring, the easy direction of movement, the smile she feels soft on her mouth. The crowd applauds the kiss he gives her on the last turn. Her mother grips her hands with her own cool ones. Papa pats Tony's shoulder. Violet and Isobel only laugh when she throws her bouquet. Like some old irony Tom drives them to the station, after George says a worn-out, sleepy goodbye. She hugs Tom beside the Renault door. He reigns in his surprise at the gesture as the conductor whistles, waves his gloved hands in the refractory of smoke, and sound snaps back as she shuts the carriage window.

“You're not all armour,” Tony says at her side.

She smiles, watching countryside rush past. “Few have the privilege of knowing that.”

 

Spain's colouring suits him, all medieval, red-hatted stone and white-washed mountains. The sea trips on the rocks. Mary learns the particular smell of salt. On the way she is staggering on the boat deck because of champagne, or the wind, or she is simply dizzy. With pale cold railings and darkness all around, England fades out in electric light. His breath falls on her temple as he holds her up, hand a warm imprint on her ribs, over her coat. He is used to ships, of course. She leans into his frame.

“Inside,” he murmurs. Coy, her hand falls beneath his jacket. Land burns to black and glinting water.

 

Her hair is short. There is sand on her fingers. His face is bearded. Light moves in siphon patterns, through white sheeting, through sea. There is a gleaming, rushing, coastal world, and no way back, and change has been lamented a thousand times, but it is real now. Clouds scuttle in. It rains and the sand washes away. The white curves around her shoulders, cool, warm. His _hands_ . She cries, one night, for no reason she can reflect on. His forehead presses to her turned back. Silent. His arm drapes her abdomen, and she reaches, feels the ring, folds her thumb into the lines of his palm. “I miss George,” she reasons. ( _I miss the life I could have had. I am content, yet I am still in limbo._ ) She can tell from his stillness that he wants to prompt her to say more, but after a pause he only curves closer to her, and she thinks of how easily she has come to live in both past and present at once. “I do love you,” she says. He makes a hum of acknowledgement. His thumb skims the side of her own. His mouth nudges against the top of her spine. He sighs, and is sleeping soon.

 

Time passes. Time comes round again. The bells of Parliament clang against the grey ripples of the river. Mary counts eleven in a reverent and restless crowd. They stand in central London at the cenotaph, within the closed-off marching roads, an echo of the Mall, a white glow on white marble, the street still. It is easy, her reaching out, something she never practiced with Matthew. She had no gold braid to cling to at those cuffs, bright in the wool. Somehow the tragedy of the sea is better than the churning of land. Ocean always churns, it swallows, and cannot quite be championed. They both wear black. She wonders if the crowds think they are in particular mourning. People look at Lady Mary's new husband. They look at his lapels and his cuffs and behind the folds of a greatcoat seam she reaches for his hand. His coat collar envelopes her vision. It grazes her cheek soft and rough. If they were at Downton they would pass the churchyard, and he would pause, asking, “Do you – ” She would shake her head, pull at his elbow. She’d see Isobel's silhouette by the stone and think the frosted soil would compress under their feet, their living weight, and it would not rise with thawing.

(That ground was hers.)

Mary’s breath is white along the stiff lines of Whitehall. “I don't suppose you miss the Navy.”

(Black was shared between them all.)

Tony’s eyes would be looking where hers were, to the mother at the son's grave. He says, “I don’t particularly want to remember it more than annually, no.”

Mary will not let herself stop to be wise. She nods. Her knuckles grip at his. She will not let herself stop, she must walk past the crowds. At home she must walk past the church and the stone walls of Crawley House. Look if she likes, or blind herself at the corner with the edge of his coat. Tony may know of her past when she cannot share the words of it so fully, in snatches that make it real, in small, heavy sentences another generation might say are beyond their years. But he is not of its tallied losses. She cannot stop. _I mustn't stop_. He knows. They keep facing forward, long strides over new asphalt.

(Theirs were the stone-cut faces, the sculpture in the round.)

They are as elegant as they were taught to be.

 

 

 

 


End file.
